Archive

2014 Internet Hall of Fame Interviews: Michael Roberts

There was a very tense peri­od between 1984 and 1988 when the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies were aggres­sive­ly try­ing to pro­mote their own view of where high-performance net­work­ing tech­nol­o­gy should go. And that view was found­ed in a top-down com­mand and con­trol engi­neer­ing mod­el. Those of us who were in the research uni­ver­si­ties, who felt very strong­ly that the end-to-end, loosely-connected Internet tech­nol­o­gy was the way to go in order to build a more robust and scal­able sys­tem real­ly had to fight very hard. 

Michael Roberts’ Internet Hall of Fame 2014 Induction Speech

My love affair with com­put­ing, which became after awhile a love affair with net­work­ing, began in the mid­dle 60s when I was a grad­u­ate stu­dent in busi­ness at Stanford. And some­one said, You know, there’s some­thing going on on the west side of cam­pus hav­ing to do with computers.”